A bus-fare protest swelled into a citywide mass march within weeks

Evidence

On Monday, June 17, the promise that had been made by those kids at the beginning of the protests came true. It was bigger. A lot bigger. Demonstrators were supposed to meet in the Pinheiros neighborhood, at the big “Potato Square.” Except you couldn’t get anywhere near there. I hopped out of a car that had stopped making progress a full thirty-minute walk from the protest’s gathering point, and made my way toward the demonstration. Except I was already sort of in it. Everyone else on the street was walking to the same place. And I never actually arrived anywhere. The further I walked, the thicker the crowd got, until, imperceptibly, we had become part of a long march making its way across São Paulo. The thing, this thing that we now were, had easily taken the place of all car traffic on the main thoroughfare where the MPL had done battle two weeks ago. Police were nowhere to be found. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 402

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A tiny fare-protest group organized mass turnstile-jumping against bus price hikes — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 184; A police crackdown transformed a small fare protest into a mass uprising — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 40

Broader Connections

• A police crackdown transformed a small fare protest into a mass uprising #contradicts (0.82) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 40